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IBM is making gaming news again. Yes, more news with IBM. It’s a coincidence I swear, but also kind of a follow-up. Anyway, butterfly.net has decided to use IBM grid computing to implement a new “gaming grid“. What this grid will alow butterfly.net to accomplish is to maintain massively multiplayer worlds with minimal lag, packet loss, or anything else that would normally hinder a good gaming experience. Plus, it will support both PC MMGs as well as consoles.

This is a low end (for lack of a better phrase) implementation of an IBM technology previously reported. Server workloads will be pushed onto Linux servers that aren’t as busy, and similarly taken off of really busy servers to maintain balance. Other offerings include “cross-server sentinels”, which essentially allow for millions of people to play in a “single” world. As opposed to now, where numerous servers host the same world for smaller groups of players (ie Percival server in DAoC). Components on The Grid are also hot swappable, since work from a downed server will immediately be put elsewhere. So ideally no downtime, though I imagine that a server exploding might cause a little hiccup.

Really neat stuff given the way the gaming market is progressing. With the advent of Final Fantasy XI, we’ll see that MMORPGs are not only popular on PCs but can be accomodated by consoles as well. It can support any genre of multiplayer game though, and is not limited to RPGs. I’m hoping that The Grid gets some decent looks at E3. butterfly.net currently has JDKs for multiple platforms available to download. Also, it’s expected that The Grid will support the Playstation 3 when it arrives to the market.

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